OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Toward cross-subject and cross-session generalization in EEG-based emotion recognition: Systematic review, taxonomy, and methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A systematic review on machine-learning strategies for improving generalizability (cross-subjects and cross-sessions) electroencephalography (EEG) based in emotion classification was realized. In this context, the non-stationarity of EEG signals is a critical issue and can lead to the Dataset Shift problem. Several architectures and methods have been proposed to address this issue, mainly based on transfer learning methods. 418 papers were retrieved from the Scopus, IEEE Xplore and PubMed databases through a search query focusing on modern machine learning techniques for generalization in EEG-based emotion assessment. Among these papers, 75 were found eligible based on their relevance to the problem. Studies lacking a specific cross-subject and cross-session validation strategy and making use of other biosignals as support were excluded. On the basis of the selected papers' analysis, a taxonomy of the studies employing Machine Learning (ML) methods was proposed, together with a brief discussion on the different ML approaches involved. The studies with the best results in terms of average classification accuracy were identified, supporting that transfer learning methods seem to perform better than other approaches. A discussion is proposed on the impact of (i) the emotion theoretical models and (ii) psychological screening of the experimental sample on the classifier performances.
Marginal Probability-Based Integer Handling for CMA-ES Tackling Single-and Multi-Objective Mixed-Integer Black-Box Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

This study targets the mixed-integer black-box optimization (MI-BBO) problem where continuous and integer variables should be optimized simultaneously. The CMA-ES, our focus in this study, is a population-based stochastic search method that samples solution candidates from a multivariate Gaussian distribution (MGD), which shows excellent performance in continuous BBO. The parameters of MGD, mean and (co)variance, are updated based on the evaluation value of candidate solutions in the CMA-ES. If the CMA-ES is applied to the MI-BBO with straightforward discretization, however, the variance corresponding to the integer variables becomes much smaller than the granularity of the discretization before reaching the optimal solution, which leads to the stagnation of the optimization. In particular, when binary variables are included in the problem, this stagnation more likely occurs because the granularity of the discretization becomes wider, and the existing integer handling for the CMA-ES does not address this stagnation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a simple integer handling for the CMA-ES based on lower-bounding the marginal probabilities associated with the generation of integer variables in the MGD. The numerical experiments on the MI-BBO benchmark problems demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method. Furthermore, in order to demonstrate the generality of the idea of the proposed method, in addition to the single-objective optimization case, we incorporate it into multi-objective CMA-ES and verify its performance on bi-objective mixed-integer benchmark problems.
Solving Quantified Modal Logic Problems by Translation to Classical Logics
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

This article describes an evaluation of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) systems on problems taken from the QMLTP library of first-order modal logic problems. Principally, the problems are translated to both typed first-order and higher-order logic in the TPTP language using an embedding approach, and solved using first-order resp. higher-order logic ATP systems and model finders. Additionally, the results from native modal logic ATP systems are considered, and compared with the results from the embedding approach. The findings are that the embedding process is reliable and successful when state-of-the-art ATP systems are used as backend reasoners, The first-order and higher-order embeddings perform similarly, native modal logic ATP systems have comparable performance to classical systems using the embedding for proving theorems, native modal logic ATP systems are outperformed by the embedding approach for disproving conjectures, and the embedding approach can cope with a wider range of modal logics than the native modal systems considered.
Weakly supervised training of universal visual concepts for multi-domain semantic segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep supervised models have an unprecedented capacity to absorb large quantities of training data. Hence, training on multiple datasets becomes a method of choice towards strong generalization in usual scenes and graceful performance degradation in edge cases. Unfortunately, different datasets often have incompatible labels. For instance, the Cityscapes road class subsumes all driving surfaces, while Vistas defines separate classes for road markings, manholes etc. Furthermore, many datasets have overlapping labels. For instance, pickups are labeled as trucks in VIPER, cars in Vistas, and vans in ADE20k. We address this challenge by considering labels as unions of universal visual concepts. This allows seamless and principled learning on multi-domain dataset collections without requiring any relabeling effort. Our method achieves competitive within-dataset and cross-dataset generalization, as well as ability to learn visual concepts which are not separately labeled in any of the training datasets. Experiments reveal competitive or state-of-the-art performance on two multi-domain dataset collections and on the WildDash 2 benchmark.
Count-Free Weisfeiler--Leman and Group Isomorphism
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate the power of counting in Group Isomorphism. We first leverage the count-free variant of the Weisfeiler--Leman Version I algorithm for groups (Brachter & Schweitzer, LICS 2020) in tandem with limited non-determinism and limited counting to improve the parallel complexity of isomorphism testing for several families of groups. These families include: - Direct products of non-Abelian simple groups. - Coprime extensions, where the normal Hall subgroup is Abelian and the complement is an $O(1)$-generated solvable group with solvability class $\text{poly} \log \log n$. This notably includes instances where the complement is an $O(1)$-generated nilpotent group. This problem was previously known to be in $\textsf{P}$ (Qiao, Sarma, & Tang, STACS 2011), and the complexity was recently improved to $\textsf{L}$ (Grochow & Levet, FCT 2023). - Graphical groups of class $2$ and exponent $p > 2$ (Mekler, J. Symb. Log., 1981) arising from the CFI and twisted CFI graphs (Cai, Fürer, & Immerman, Combinatorica 1992) respectively. In particular, our work improves upon previous results of Brachter & Schweitzer (LICS 2020). We finally show that the $q$-ary count-free pebble game is unable to distinguish even Abelian groups. This extends the result of Grochow & Levet (ibid), who established the result in the case of $q = 1$. The general theme is that some counting appears necessary to place Group Isomorphism into $\textsf{P}$.
Sum and Tensor of Quantitative Effects
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Inspired by the seminal work of Hyland, Plotkin, and Power on the combination of algebraic computational effects via sum and tensor, we develop an analogous theory for the combination of quantitative algebraic effects. Quantitative algebraic effects are monadic computational effects on categories of metric spaces, which, moreover, have an algebraic presentation in the form of quantitative equational theories, a logical framework introduced by Mardare, Panangaden, and Plotkin that generalises equational logic to account for a concept of approximate equality. As our main result, we show that the sum and tensor of two quantitative equational theories correspond to the categorical sum (i.e., coproduct) and tensor, respectively, of their effects qua monads. We further give a theory of quantitative effect transformers based on these two operations, essentially providing quantitative analogues to the following monad transformers due to Moggi: exception, resumption, reader, and writer transformers. Finally, as an application, we provide the first quantitative algebraic axiomatizations to the following coalgebraic structures: Markov processes, labelled Markov processes, Mealy machines, and Markov decision processes, each endowed with their respective bisimilarity metrics. Apart from the intrinsic interest in these axiomatizations, it is pleasing they have been obtained as the composition, via sum and tensor, of simpler quantitative equational theories.
Data-Centric Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Data-centric artificial intelligence (data-centric AI) represents an emerging paradigm emphasizing that the systematic design and engineering of data is essential for building effective and efficient AI-based systems. The objective of this article is to introduce practitioners and researchers from the field of Information Systems (IS) to data-centric AI. We define relevant terms, provide key characteristics to contrast the data-centric paradigm to the model-centric one, and introduce a framework for data-centric AI. We distinguish data-centric AI from related concepts and discuss its longer-term implications for the IS community.
Impossibility Theorems for Feature Attribution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Despite a sea of interpretability methods that can produce plausible explanations, the field has also empirically seen many failure cases of such methods. In light of these results, it remains unclear for practitioners how to use these methods and choose between them in a principled way. In this paper, we show that for moderately rich model classes (easily satisfied by neural networks), any feature attribution method that is complete and linear -- for example, Integrated Gradients and SHAP -- can provably fail to improve on random guessing for inferring model behaviour. Our results apply to common end-tasks such as characterizing local model behaviour, identifying spurious features, and algorithmic recourse. One takeaway from our work is the importance of concretely defining end-tasks: once such an end-task is defined, a simple and direct approach of repeated model evaluations can outperform many other complex feature attribution methods.
Beyond SOT: Tracking Multiple Generic Objects at Once
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generic Object Tracking (GOT) is the problem of tracking target objects, specified by bounding boxes in the first frame of a video. While the task has received much attention in the last decades, researchers have almost exclusively focused on the single object setting. Multi-object GOT benefits from a wider applicability, rendering it more attractive in real-world applications. We attribute the lack of research interest into this problem to the absence of suitable benchmarks. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale GOT benchmark, LaGOT, containing multiple annotated target objects per sequence. Our benchmark allows users to tackle key remaining challenges in GOT, aiming to increase robustness and reduce computation through joint tracking of multiple objects simultaneously. In addition, we propose a transformer-based GOT tracker baseline capable of joint processing of multiple objects through shared computation. Our approach achieves a 4x faster run-time in case of 10 concurrent objects compared to tracking each object independently and outperforms existing single object trackers on our new benchmark. In addition, our approach achieves highly competitive results on single-object GOT datasets, setting a new state of the art on TrackingNet with a success rate AUC of 84.4%. Our benchmark, code, and trained models will be made publicly available.
Learning to Detect and Segment for Open Vocabulary Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Open vocabulary object detection has been greatly advanced by the recent development of vision-language pretrained model, which helps recognize novel objects with only semantic categories. The prior works mainly focus on knowledge transferring to the object proposal classification and employ class-agnostic box and mask prediction. In this work, we propose CondHead, a principled dynamic network design to better generalize the box regression and mask segmentation for open vocabulary setting. The core idea is to conditionally parameterize the network heads on semantic embedding and thus the model is guided with class-specific knowledge to better detect novel categories. Specifically, CondHead is composed of two streams of network heads, the dynamically aggregated head and the dynamically generated head. The former is instantiated with a set of static heads that are conditionally aggregated, these heads are optimized as experts and are expected to learn sophisticated prediction. The latter is instantiated with dynamically generated parameters and encodes general class-specific information. With such a conditional design, the detection model is bridged by the semantic embedding to offer strongly generalizable class-wise box and mask prediction. Our method brings significant improvement to the state-of-the-art open vocabulary object detection methods with very minor overhead, e.g., it surpasses a RegionClip model by 3.0 detection AP on novel categories, with only 1.1% more computation.
Combinatorial Multi-Access Coded Caching: Improved Rate-Memory Trade-off with Coded Placement
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This work considers the combinatorial multi-access coded caching problem introduced in the recent work by Muralidhar \textit{et al.} [P. N. Muralidhar, D. Katyal, and B. S. Rajan, ``Maddah-Ali-Niesen scheme for multi-access coded caching,'' in \textit{IEEE Inf. Theory Workshop (ITW)}, 2021] The problem setting consists of a central server having a library of $N$ files and $C$ caches each with capacity $M$. Each user in the system can access a unique set of $r<C$ caches, and there exist users corresponding to every distinct set of $r$ caches. Therefore, the number of users in the system is $\binom{C}{r}$. For the aforementioned combinatorial multi-access setting, we propose a coded caching scheme with an MDS code-based coded placement. This novel placement technique helps to achieve a better rate in the delivery phase compared to the optimal scheme under uncoded placement when $M> N/C$. For a lower memory regime, we present another scheme with coded placement, which outperforms the optimal scheme under uncoded placement if the number of files is no more than the number of users. Further, we derive an information-theoretic lower bound on the optimal rate-memory trade-off of the combinatorial multi-access coded caching scheme. In addition, using the derived lower bound, we show that the first scheme is optimal in the higher memory regime, and the second scheme is optimal if $N\leq \binom{C}{r}$. Finally, we show that the performance of the first scheme is within a constant factor of the optimal performance, when $r=2$.
StepNet: Spatial-temporal Part-aware Network for Isolated Sign Language Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The goal of sign language recognition (SLR) is to help those who are hard of hearing or deaf overcome the communication barrier. Most existing approaches can be typically divided into two lines, i.e., Skeleton-based and RGB-based methods, but both the two lines of methods have their limitations. Skeleton-based methods do not consider facial expressions, while RGB-based approaches usually ignore the fine-grained hand structure. To overcome both limitations, we propose a new framework called Spatial-temporal Part-aware network~(StepNet), based on RGB parts. As its name suggests, it is made up of two modules: Part-level Spatial Modeling and Part-level Temporal Modeling. Part-level Spatial Modeling, in particular, automatically captures the appearance-based properties, such as hands and faces, in the feature space without the use of any keypoint-level annotations. On the other hand, Part-level Temporal Modeling implicitly mines the long-short term context to capture the relevant attributes over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our StepNet, thanks to spatial-temporal modules, achieves competitive Top-1 Per-instance accuracy on three commonly-used SLR benchmarks, i.e., 56.89% on WLASL, 77.2% on NMFs-CSL, and 77.1% on BOBSL. Additionally, the proposed method is compatible with the optical flow input and can produce superior performance if fused. For those who are hard of hearing, we hope that our work can act as a preliminary step.
ESVIO: Event-based Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Event cameras that asynchronously output low-latency event streams provide great opportunities for state estimation under challenging situations. Despite event-based visual odometry having been extensively studied in recent years, most of them are based on monocular and few research on stereo event vision. In this paper, we present ESVIO, the first event-based stereo visual-inertial odometry, which leverages the complementary advantages of event streams, standard images and inertial measurements. Our proposed pipeline achieves temporal tracking and instantaneous matching between consecutive stereo event streams, thereby obtaining robust state estimation. In addition, the motion compensation method is designed to emphasize the edge of scenes by warping each event to reference moments with IMU and ESVIO back-end. We validate that both ESIO (purely event-based) and ESVIO (event with image-aided) have superior performance compared with other image-based and event-based baseline methods on public and self-collected datasets. Furthermore, we use our pipeline to perform onboard quadrotor flights under low-light environments. A real-world large-scale experiment is also conducted to demonstrate long-term effectiveness. We highlight that this work is a real-time, accurate system that is aimed at robust state estimation under challenging environments.
Almost-Bayesian Quadratic Persuasion (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

In this article, we relax the Bayesianity assumption in the now-traditional model of Bayesian Persuasion introduced by Kamenica & Gentzkow. Unlike preexisting approaches -- which have tackled the possibility of the receiver (Bob) being non-Bayesian by considering that his thought process is not Bayesian yet known to the sender (Alice), possibly up to a parameter -- we let Alice merely assume that Bob behaves 'almost like' a Bayesian agent, in some sense, without resorting to any specific model. Under this assumption, we study Alice's strategy when both utilities are quadratic and the prior is isotropic. We show that, contrary to the Bayesian case, Alice's optimal response may not be linear anymore. This fact is unfortunate as linear policies remain the only ones for which the induced belief distribution is known. What is more, evaluating linear policies proves difficult except in particular cases, let alone finding an optimal one. Nonetheless, we derive bounds that prove linear policies are near-optimal and allow Alice to compute a near-optimal linear policy numerically. With this solution in hand, we show that Alice shares less information with Bob as he departs more from Bayesianity, much to his detriment.
A DRL Approach for RIS-Assisted Full-Duplex UL and DL Transmission: Beamforming, Phase Shift and Power Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for a full-duplex (FD) transmission that predicts the phase shifts of the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), base station (BS) active beamformers, and the transmit powers to maximize the weighted sum rate of uplink and downlink users. Existing methods require channel state information (CSI) and residual self-interference (SI) knowledge to calculate exact active beamformers or the DRL rewards, which typically fail without CSI or residual SI. Especially for time-varying channels, estimating and signaling CSI to the DRL agent is required at each time step and is costly. We propose a two-stage DRL framework with minimal signaling overhead to address this. The first stage uses the least squares method to initiate learning by partially canceling the residual SI. The second stage uses DRL to achieve performance comparable to existing CSI-based methods without requiring the CSI or the exact residual SI. Further, the proposed DRL framework for quantized RIS phase shifts reduces the signaling from BS to the RISs using $32$ times fewer bits than the continuous version. The quantized methods reduce action space, resulting in faster convergence and $7.1\%$ and $22.28\%$ better UL and DL rates, respectively than the continuous method.
PanDepth: Joint Panoptic Segmentation and Depth Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding 3D environments semantically is pivotal in autonomous driving applications where multiple computer vision tasks are involved. Multi-task models provide different types of outputs for a given scene, yielding a more holistic representation while keeping the computational cost low. We propose a multi-task model for panoptic segmentation and depth completion using RGB images and sparse depth maps. Our model successfully predicts fully dense depth maps and performs semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation for every input frame. Extensive experiments were done on the Virtual KITTI 2 dataset and we demonstrate that our model solves multiple tasks, without a significant increase in computational cost, while keeping high accuracy performance. Code is available at https://github.com/juanb09111/PanDepth.git
An Analysis of Attention via the Lens of Exchangeability and Latent Variable Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a rigorous theory on how the attention mechanism achieves it. In particular, several intriguing questions remain open: (a) What makes a desirable representation? (b) How does the attention mechanism infer the desirable representation within the forward pass? (c) How does a pretraining procedure learn to infer the desirable representation through the backward pass? We observe that, as is the case in BERT and ViT, input tokens are often exchangeable since they already include positional encodings. The notion of exchangeability induces a latent variable model that is invariant to input sizes, which enables our theoretical analysis. - To answer (a) on representation, we establish the existence of a sufficient and minimal representation of input tokens. In particular, such a representation instantiates the posterior distribution of the latent variable given input tokens, which plays a central role in predicting output labels and solving downstream tasks. - To answer (b) on inference, we prove that attention with the desired parameter infers the latent posterior up to an approximation error, which is decreasing in input sizes. In detail, we quantify how attention approximates the conditional mean of the value given the key, which characterizes how it performs relational inference over long sequences. - To answer (c) on learning, we prove that both supervised and self-supervised objectives allow empirical risk minimization to learn the desired parameter up to a generalization error, which is independent of input sizes. Particularly, in the self-supervised setting, we identify a condition number that is pivotal to solving downstream tasks.